Silverlight Released, Linux Version Coming

Today Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 for Windows and Mac OS X. This cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in is fully supported and competes directly with Adobe Flash. Included in this release was the promise from Microsoft to support the 100% compatible Linux version, called Moonlight.

What can posibly happen...

[Daimanta]

Microsoft will include Silverlight as an update and makes it high priority. Silverlight becomes success and passes Flash as the major app in the sector. MS will discontinue Moonlight because of BS reason. Linux is locked out by vendor lock-in.

This is purely hypothetical but not at all improbable.

MLB.com

[hansamurai]

Silverlight has been on mlb.com for a few weeks now, I guess they were one of the first partners. I find this all extremely obnoxious as that site is a huge crap mix of Flash, pop-ups, WMV, and now Silverlight. And that's not counting all the issues with the pay-to-view content, DRM, and content black outs. Sometimes all I want to see is some highlights from last night's games, but I don't want to jump through hoops to do so. Silverlight is just the next annoying hoop, it may look pretty, but it's also on fire.

Miguel must be happy today

[kripkenstein]

I am generally quite paranoid about Microsoft's intentions, but this got even me to thinking. On the one hand,

• Microsoft are publicly endorsing Linux as a respectable OS. Not more of the "multiplatform = Windows and Mac OS" crap.
• It does appear that Microsoft is willing to conduct a true partnership here - even offering Novell their internal test suites, which means they really do want it to work. Hopefully this isn't a temporary thing.

However, on the other hand,

• "[D]etails that might be necessary to implement 1.0, beyond what is currently published on the web" ...why are not all Silverlight specs and APIs publicly available? Are people supposed to pay money to develop on this platform, or are they strategically delaying publishing the specs, or what? In any case it sounds very fishy. Enlighten me if there is a good explanation for this that I am missing.
• The codecs are binary-only and only for use in a web browser. This is annoying, but it is about the same as Adobe do with Flash, I guess. Bad, but not quite 'Microsoft' bad.

So what is going on here? Hard to say. The only thing I am sure about is that after years of Miguel de Icaza following a not-always-popular pro-Microsoft approach, today he must feel quite vindicated: Microsoft has taken another big step towards respecting and collaborating with Linux (or at least Novell), and Miguel is a big part of that.

Silverlight IS a wonderful thing

[El Lobo]

I've been creating some Silverlight apps the last monts and my impresions are very positive. I have created some flash apps in the past, and there is no comparation. With Silverlight you have a very important subset of the .NET platform ready to use. Silverlight is not only the presentation forms (whichis also goos), but you can transparently use databases, manipulate and parse HTLM, wire handler events for HTML, excellent communication capabilities, and a lot more. IMO everything is more powerful/organized than the flash conteirpart.... Way to go!

Re:MLB.com

[Jugalator]

Wouldn't it be cool if some hacker got creative and instead of defacing sites, replaced them with logical layouts and no ads. Sort of a Benevolent Defacer.

Sure, it would take some extra effort, but the aftermath from disappointed customers now seeing what they missed, as they restored the site to the bloated mess could get pretty funny. :)

Re:Hmm...

[everphilski]

It actually does work on Firefox. I have it working here, FF 2.0.0.6.

Obviously it's a trap - but it can be stopped

[toby]

Open letter to Adobe - release Flash under the GNU GPL today

Dear Adobe,

No doubt you've seen the news that Microsoft and Novell are to work on a version of Silverlight for GNU/Linux. This puts Silverlight onto all three major platforms now, and puts yourselves and us into a difficult position. As the free software community, we want users of computers to have freedom to do all the jobs they can, including all those nice interactive websites out there that use Flash. We have Gnash now, but it's not finished yet, but it at least lets us look at YouTube movies in the browser with little or no problem, and Homestar Runner works very well as well. We're not there yet, but we're getting somewhere. Now, from your point of view, you give away the Flash player, but only in binary form, which means that while I'm sure it's better than Gnash, your license prevents us from using it with freedom. So, here's the rub... if you'll do a little thing for us, we can do some great things for you. We can help you beat Microsoft and crush Silverlight, but you're going to have to do something a little unusual, and a lot of people at Adobe aren't going to like it, but you have to do this and do it quickly.

Here goes... Make Flash free software, specifically, release Flash - the player, the editor, the server, for all platforms, including embedded stuff, under the GNU GPL v3 and do it quickly. As soon as you do this, we can start to win. We can get Flash Player onto the One Laptop Per Child machines, which gets a ton more eyeballs looking at Flash. We can get gNewSense, Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Slackware, Mandriva and all the others to distribute Flash Player with their distributions. OpenSolaris can have Flash Player, too. You can still sell copies of the Flash editor, in lovely cardboard boxes on the shelves of computer stores, even as Free Software - you just need to add value. Bundle DVDs of freely licensed shapes, characters, sounds, loops and effects and dead-tree editions of your now freely licensed manuals, and people will still buy it, and of course, you bundle it in with things like Creative Suite, so it gets onto more machines, and you make it a free of charge download, too. You encourage people to torrent it, and the source, and you'll see more features being added, you'll see more video formats being supported and you'll see people doing amazing things with software you created, but only if you act quickly and get this right.

Don't lose this to Microsoft, for the sake of freedom of computer users everywhere, for the sake of a free web and for the sake of generations of people to come, don't let Microsoft get away with this.

Sun are doing this with Java, they did it with OpenOffice.org. You can do this as well.

It's entirely down to you now. If you need help, ask. If you have questions, shout.

Call the Free Software Foundation today, and make this happen.

([phone])

Do the right thing.

Do it.

Best,

matt

Exploring Freedom [mattl.co.uk] blog.

Re:It's a trap

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean implementing WMA & WMV? Good luck!

Re:Silverlight IS a wonderful thing

[Anonymous Coward]

With Silverlight you have a very important subset of the .NET platform ready to use.

Interesting. Now I haven't done anything with .NET yet, so I have to ask. Is .NET also cross-platform, or will Silverlight be a case of "Oh it's crossplatform, but if you actually want it to be easy, you should be using a .NET enabled OS"?

Which I'm guessing is only Windows at present?

Re:Gnash

[LWATCDR]

Yes I do but I don't want another version of FLASH!
Flash just sucks. It really does. Action Script is a terrible language there are all sorts of issues with flash.

Why doesn't the FOSS community come up with a replacement for Flash and not just a copy?
Make a plug in for IE and get Firefox, Opera, and Safari to include it in their browsers?
Make it FOSS BSD please so the embedded people can use it for their systems.
Use Ogg for the codecs.
And write good authoring tools.
Make it good, open, and free.

There is no catch

[LS]

Everyone is wondering what the bait and switch scheme is. Perhaps there is none. Microsoft may be realizing that the OS battle is a losing one. Just look at the Vista fiasco. The move to from local apps to web services has been predicted for a while and has had several false starts, but recently there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel. Microsoft doesn't care if the the underlying operating system is Linux as long as you are running their web services on top of it.

LS

Re:Miguel must be happy today

[miguel]

Hello,

"[D]etails that might be necessary to implement 1.0, beyond what is currently published on the web" ...why are not all Silverlight specs and APIs publicly available? Are people supposed to pay money to develop on this platform, or are they strategically delaying publishing the specs, or what? In any case it sounds very fishy. Enlighten me if there is a good explanation for this that I am missing.

Let me explain.

The specs as published on the web are pretty complete as far as a programming API goes. But there are some things that we do not quite understand how they work (either because the docs are not as complete as they should be, or because as implementors we need more details about the internals than those that are visible to the end user.

One thing that we have noticed over the years is that internal specifications are probably built by PMs at Microsoft. And these PMs use these internal specifications to explain certain behaviors on their blogs. I suspect this is because it is a fast path of communication as opposed to going through the documentation pipeline for released products. They are also probably able to clarify things for docs that have been already published. This is my guess.

So access to the specs is basically access to some documents and explanations that might not have made it to the public specification (for example recently Jackson and Chris had some questions about how the namespaces for CreateFromXaml behaved in the presence of merged trees, and it was not entirely clear how it worked; Luckily the Microsoft PM in charge of this was able to resolve the question in seconds).

he only thing I am sure about is that after years of Miguel de Icaza following a not-always-popular pro-Microsoft approach, today he must feel quite vindicated: Microsoft has taken another big step towards respecting and collaborating with Linux (or at least Novell), and Miguel is a big part of that.

Thanks for the nice words; I do feel that way.

In general, I think that there is much to be gained by having friendly relations with everyone in the industry instead of taking an antagonistic position. You attract more bees with honey than with vinegar kind of thing, and am glad that this is starting to show. I hope to see more collaborations between Microsoft and the Linux community in the future, not limited to Mono, but going beyond that.

Miguel.

Re:History

[simpz]

And HP-UX.. Along with Outlook Express on both. See the Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for _UNIX [wikipedia.org] MS promised you could have a standard IE browser across all platforms. However as soon as the Netscape threat was out of the way it was discontinued without warning (good luck if you were a cross platform business that took their advice, MS listens and serves it's customers don't you know). I don't see how MS would treat this any differently. Even if the Linux implementation is open source they just have to load the MS one with patented codecs etc.

What I really want....

[Mystery00]

Is for Adobe to release Flash under Linux, and not the player, I'm talking about the editing/actionscripting suit, I don't care about another "flash killer" or another plugin for the browser, I want better tools for content creation under Linux, if Microsoft can provide this, hopefully it will make Adobe do the same, the way I see it, the only reason this _could_ be good, is if it pushes Adobe to get better Linux support, Microsoft's products generally suck, so I'm not expecting much from them, but if it makes Adobe get off its collective overfed ass and get back into making products instead of raking in the money, then I say awesome. Of course, I doubt this will happen, but one can dream....

Compare it to Adobe Flex, not Flash

[arete]

If you're comparing it only to Flash - and especially older Flash - you're not giving Adobe a fair shake.

Put briefly, Adobe Flex is in beta of it's 4th major version, and it's what Adobe is offering for programming targeting the Flash Player. For a programmer, it is worlds better than Flash.

Silverlight might be awesome, I haven't touched it, but everything you said about it are all the same improvements over Flash that Flex has been doing for years now.

Flash is an animation tool. People starting using it for applications, and starting in 2002 and again in 2004 Macromedia gave it real support as a programming language. This is all still true, and they've continued to improve that.

But we're now on version 2 (3 is in beta, 1.5 was a major version) of Adobe Flex, which should be considered the follow-on to Flash for programmers and applications. The Actionscript which underlies this is identical in the two platforms, although Flex is driving the new AS versions and Flash lags behind a bit. But Flex also removes all the major craziness that programmers hated in Flash - layout is in an MXML (specific kind of XML) file, there is no binary source file like a fla, and it has further strengthened the already-present OOP capabilities. They have a Dreamweaver-like WYSIWYG layout editor and IDE - and it's also an Eclipse plugin. But like Dreamweaver and unlike Flash, there's no requirement that you use that.

Oh, and if you don't mind command-line compilation and a text editor, the SDK is free.

And that's all only if you don't install the Flex server. It is ALSO a presentation layer server, and Flex Data Services have a bunch of really smooth ways to give shared persistence or to interact with any other application server you might have.

I don't know whether Silverlight also requires the server to support it - I imagine it must to have "a subset of .NET" available; Flex can definitely make standalone swf and can operate with it's full server installed. (The server can also compile on the fly)

REALLY, though, my big issue is mostly that I just do not trust Microsoft to make a good secure sandbox; they've shown no evidence of being able to pull this off in the past. Using something like this is inherently allowing complex arbitrary code to run... I'm sure this will be better than ActiveX, because it couldn't be worse...

Re:Miguel must be happy today

[Just some bastard]

I hope to see more collaborations between Microsoft and the Linux community in the future, not limited to Mono, but going beyond that.

Beyond that into more threats of patent litigation, more ghost lawsuits, more FUD and even more heavy handed lobbying? Here's what I hope to see; Microsoft competing in the market without abusing its monopoly position (Re Java, flash, pdf ...).

Most of us get Microsoft loud and clear, how strange that you do not.

Re:Compare it to Adobe Flex, not Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know whether Silverlight also requires the server to support it - I imagine it must to have "a subset of .NET" available

No, and that's the point: the Silverlight player includes the cut-down .NET runtime for scripting as well as JavaScript. Or at least it will in 1.1 - for 1.0 you have to use JS. There's a Silverlight demo where you can pit a C# chess engine and a JavaScript chess engine against each other at 1-second speed chess - not surprisingly, the .NET version annihilates the JS version easily because it can compute an order of magnitude more positions.

REALLY, though, my big issue is mostly that I just do not trust Microsoft to make a good secure sandbox

And that's the point of this article - it's not Microsoft implementing this for Linux, it's Mono.

And to be fair IE7 on Vista fixed pretty much everything wrong with ActiveX's security model.

Re:It's a trap

[mhall119]

Java's numbers are purely because it's been around longer and has always had a large net presence.

I see, and the explanation for Java also ranking higher than C, C++, VB, Perl, Cobol and Fortran would be?

My take on Silverlight

[jason777]

First of all, there have been a lot of posts claiming MS will take over by bundling Silverlight with windows update. Well, that is not true. Check the official faq, they say they will play fair. Right, we just have their word but whatever. http://silverlightfaq.com/2007/04/25/how-will-silv erlight-be-distributed-by-microsoft/ [silverlightfaq.com]

Second, I can also chime in here and state that I am evaluating Silverlight and Flash/Flex for a production web application with a deadline of January.

I came from no experience with either technology. I am a .net c# developer. I completely built the application first on Silverlight 1.1 in one month. It works great. I then built a portion of the application in Flex just to learn both technologies. I can say that doing it in C# was way more intuitive and natural, and FAST. The xaml and everything was easy to learn. Now flash/flex was not as intuitive at all, and was harder to learn. Once I learned it, I thought it was OK, but I do prefer Silverlight. Granted, thats probably because I'm a .net developer already. But I just found silverlight easier, even for just creating the graphics. Also, realize I am an experienced Photoshop user, so you would think I would like the flash tools better.

Re:Gnash

[Aleksej]

I hope the video tag gets into Firefox and Opera. They (Mozilla) were also going to put the ability to write JS to rotate/drag/resize the video being played -- like that for photos in that Microsoft table demo, whatever it was called. With JavaScript, it should be possible to mix SVG in. Too bad text resizing affects SVG in a bad way now, but as they are implementing full zoom (and it did work already), there is still a chance for Gran Paradiso.

Re:Doing the right thing?

[FatherOfONe]

Balmer, chair throwing.... Man that brings back memories. Speaking of memories... you do remember the company that champions the motto of "If it isn't invented here: kill it". Or "We need to piss all over Java2". Or better yet "You develop a browser for Windows 95 and we will cut off your air supply". These are just a few that I can think of, and there are plenty more. So to use your analogy, I could see Steve Balmer running in to the building and saving the 25 kids that actually bought Vista, then burning the rest of the building down, killing hundreds of other kids. Microsoft would of course spin this as "Balmer saves 25 kids from burning building" and say that the other kids died because the sprinkler system ran on a JVM.

If it sounds like I am jaded about Microsofts business practices then all I can say is look at the last 20 years and tell me why I shouldn't be. The good news is that they are floundering around now and can't seem to find their direction. They have lost their focus (much like IBM did in the past), and have way too many battles going on. Office profits dropping, New OS sales slumping, developers excited and working on other companies products.... ~40 billion in the bank now down to around 20 billion. 1 billion in recalls of the 360... Yes they are not going anywhere, but the 800 pound Gorilla is now down to around 300 pounds...

This product from them will go largely unnoticed by most of the development community except those that already live and breath Microsoft (current .Net developers).

Re:Gnash

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with flash and great projects like gnash is that it will never be a full freely distributable implementation as long as we have draconian patent laws. Components such as flash video are patented. Likewise the silverlight won't be complete in a free distribution.

That's changing. The latest beta [adobe.com] of the Flashplayer supports h.264 video with AAC audio in an mp4 container [kaourantin.net]. Mozilla Tamarin [mozilla.org] is the VM introduced in Flashplayer 9 and targeted by everything ActionScript 3 (like Flash CS3 can and Flex 2 always does, as well as the to-be-Free Flex 3 SDK [adobe.com]). It's much faster than the one in previous versions, so developers will use that one increasingly. For video content, publishers can choose between an open standard with free tools, or a proprietary expensive one, so what do you think will they do?
That's two major building blocks right there. The rest of the format is basically just tags that define, transform and place sprites. Gnash already does a good job at that. Some pieces in the Adobe Flashplayer's renderer are patented, but there are excellent libraries [antigrain.com] for that. Of course, the API [adobe.com] would have to be implemented (the flash.* packages, mx.* builds on that and will be part of the Flex 3 SDK).
The SWF specification [sf.net] isn't the problem, there are some Free tools out there that already have very good support of SWF and related protocols. With the Flex 3 SDK, there will even be one from Adobe you can legally look at (IANAL).

You have to understand that Gnash tries to support existing content first. That is a big task, and I wish them well. But if you leave out legacy support and focus on what Adobe's current tools put out, it gets much easier. Grossly simplified, there's the VM, there are readers, renderers and codecs, add glue.